Why Colin Powell's endorsement mattered more than Dick Cheney's
Not all cross-party backing carries the same weight
Welcome back to the This Day In Esoteric Political History newsletter. Each week, a member of our team (or a friend of the show) gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
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Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American political history…
October 24
1871: A mob of around 500 White and Hispanic people entered L.A.’s Old Chinatown and attacked Chinese residents.
1929: The Dow falls 12.8% on Black Thursday.
1938: The Fair Labor Standards Act bans oppressive child labor.
1973 : Former Beatle John Lennon sued the U.S. government, demanding to know whether he was under FBI surveillance
2005: Rosa Parks dies at the age of 92.
2008: Former secretary of state Colin Powell goes on Meet the Press and endorses Barack Obama for president — over his longtime friend, and fellow Republican, John McCain
October 25
1923: The first Teapot Dome scandal report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Public Lands is published.
1929: Former interior secretary Albert Fall becomes the first cabinet member to go to jail after being convicted of taking as much as $400,000 in bribes.
1966: A group gathers for the first conference of the National Organization for Women, aka NOW.
2002: Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, 11 days before the midterm election.
October 26
1825: The Erie Canal opens, connecting Lake Erie and the Hudson River
1857: The residents of Seneca Village, a community mostly comprised of formerly enslaved African-Americans, were forcibly removed in order to make room for the construction of Manhattan’s Central Park
1916: Margaret Sanger opens the country’s first known birth control clinic in Brooklyn
October 27
1871: Boss Tweed is arrested after The New York Times exposes his embezzlement of city funds.
1962: An American spy plane is shot down over Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1964: Ronald Reagan delivers the "A Time for Choosing" speech
1969: Ralph Nader establishes a consumer organization known as Nader’s Raiders.
2008: An ad for Sen. Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina comes close to accusing her opponent, Kay Hagan, of not believing in God.
October 28
1886: President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty.
1974: The Equal Credit Opportunity Act makes it unlawful for any creditor to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, or age. Before the enactment of the law, lenders and the federal government frequently and explicitly discriminated against female loan applicants and held female applicants to different standards from male applicants.
1990: Jesse Helms’ controversial ‘Hands’ (or “White Hands”) ad begins running in an NC reelection campaign, attacking Democrat Harvey Gantt by citing racial quota laws.
October 29
1682: William Penn founds Philadelphia
1692: The Salem witch trials court is dissolved.
1901: President William McKinley's assassin, Leon Czolgosz, is put to death.
1929: The stock market experiences a major collapse, marking the beginning of the Great Depression.
1945: Happy Chandler resigns as US Senator to focus on his role as MLB commissioner.
1948: A heavy, pollutant-laden fog is sitting over the Pennsylvania town of Donora. Over the course of five days, dozens of people would die and half the town’s population would get sick.
October 30
1912: William Howard Taft's running mate, James Sherman, dies in New Hampshire, days before the presidential election.
2005: The late Rosa Parks becomes the first woman to "lie in honor" in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, a significant honor for her role in the civil rights movement.
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more. This week it’s Jacob Feldman’s turn at the typewriter.
16 years ago, retired general and respected Republican Colin Powell surprised both Presidential campaigns with his endorsement of Barack Obama. The move quashed doubts about Obama’s relative lack of foreign policy experience. It likely didn’t swing the election—John McCain was in the process of losing the race without any extra help—but it did have a sizable impact on the way Americans viewed Obama.
You could see how Dick and Liz Cheney’s endorsements of Kamala Harris might have a similar impact this year, except for some key differences.
Foreign policy and experience may be two of the few areas where a voter’s view of the candidates can evolve, since they are generally less tied to ideology. That increased Powell’s impact, while Dick’s endorsement is more focused on Trump (“There has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” he said in September) than any of Harris’ credentials.
Trump has regularly bashed both Cheneys, weakening the influence they might have over committed Republicans and lending credence to the argument that their issue with the former President is more personal than political. McCain, on the other hand, could only continue to compliment Powell.
Most importantly, it remains unclear just how many Cheney fans remain. That was even true back in 2008. After the then-VP spoke at a Wyoming rally in support of Republicans, Team Obama had an ad ready to go within 90 minutes tying Cheney and McCain together.
Now, Tim Walz is being forced to sorta-kinda-defend the Cheney name, adding to the campaign’s complex task of pitching itself as both the ticket of the future while at the same time being the steady alternative to Trump.
A little more esoterica
We’re always ready for more multi-city portal content. After an NYC-Dublin two-way screen was shut down this summer due to “inappropriate behavior,” Philadelphia is getting its own version. And in a nice ode to political history, Philly’s portal is already cracked.
We talked a bit about targeted ads in our recent run-through of how political messaging got so bad. Now Elon Musk has reportedly provided a textbook example, portraying Kamala Harris as pro-Israel in Michigan, and as pro-Palestine in Pennsylvania.
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